Aus:

Dietrich Helms, Thomas Phleps (Hg.)Ware InszenierungenPerformance, Vermarktung und Authentizitätin der populären Musik

März 2013, 230 Seiten, kart., 21,80 €, ISBN 978-3-8376-2298-0

Populäre Musik ist ›performte‹ Musik, sie ist eine Musik des Machens – im Gegensatzzu einer Musik des Erdenkens und Notierens des schriftlich fixierten Werkes. IhreMedien sind Medien, die Performance ermöglichen, vervielfältigen und transportie-ren: die Schallplatte, das Video, die MP3-Datei – und zuerst das Konzert, das als Ur-form in alle Verbreitungsmedien eingeschrieben ist.Die Beiträge dieses Bandes zeigen: Die Art und Weise, wie, wo und von wem Musikgemacht wird, ist entscheidend – für die Wahrnehmung des Stückes, die Abgrenzun-gen der Musiker untereinander, für die Festlegung von Genregrenzen, aber auch fürProzesse der Aneignung und Individuation durch das Publikum.

Dietrich Helms (Prof. Dr.) lehrt historische Musikwissenschaft an der Universität Os-nabrück.Thomas Phleps (Prof. Dr.) lehrt am Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Musikpädago-gik der Universität Gießen.

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© 2013 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

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INHALT

Editor ia l

7

The Value of L ive Music Simon Frith

9

Sound und Bi ld: Die audio/visuel le Ökonomie musikal i scher Performance

Philip Auslander 23

Schein oder Nicht-Schein? Zur Inszenierung von Authent iz i tät auf der Bühne

Ralf von Appen 41

Inszenierte Authent iz i tät versus authent ische Inszenierung: e in Ordnungsversuch zum Konzept

Authentiz i tät in Medienkultur und Popmusik Christoph Jacke

71

Abhängige Inszenierungen der Unabhängigkeit . Der Independent-Diskurs in Musikzeitschr i f ten

André Doehring 97

›Gute Frage!‹ Populäre Inszenierungen von Frage-Antwort-Strategien auf

Pressekonferenzen im Bereich der Popmusik Anja Peltzer

119

Der dokumentar ische Gestus. E ine Spurensuche in populärer Musik und Kultur

in der BRD der 1970er Jahre Barbara Hornberger

137

Die Facetten der Josephine Baker Christa Bruckner-Haring und Ildiko Keikutt-Licht

153

An Understanding of Performance: The Beat les in Hamburg

Ian Inglis 171

Pink Riefenstahl.

(Un-)Authent ische Inszenierungen von Homophi l ie und Homophobie im Musikvideo

»Mann gegen Mann« von Rammstein Christian Diemer

187

Übersetzen und Rahmen. Aufführungen in g lobal is ierten Pop(ulär)kulturen

Gabriele Klein 211

Zu den Autoren

223

7

EDITORIAL

»All that we see or seem / is but a dream within a dream« zitiert das Alan

Parsons Project 1976 den Refrain eines Gedichts des Altmeisters des literari-

schen Horrors, Edgar Allan Poe, als Motto seines Instrumentals »A Dream

Within A Dream«.1 Damit ist sehr treffend das Dilemma beschrieben, mit

dem wir auf der Suche nach dem Echten in den diversen Systemen des Pop

konfrontiert sind. Wie ein Traum umreißt ein Popsong eine Welt außerhalb der Alltagswahrnehmung von (de facto) sehr kurzer Dauer, aber doch voll-

ständig und abgeschlossen. Und wie im Traum hat man für die Zeit des

Hörens einen Eindruck von Wirklichkeit. Wirkung entsteht, weil wir uns

wirklich angesprochen fühlen. Erst in der Außensicht wird der Traum zum

Traum, der Song zur Inszenierung. Doch wie wirklich ist die Außensicht? Für

die Beantwortung dieser Frage leistet sich unsere Gesellschaft einen eige-nen Berufsstand: die Musikjournalisten. Jetzt heißen Echtheit und Wirklich-

keit Authentizität; Interviews, Homestories und Reportagen behaupten, die

wahre Seite des Musikers erfahrbar zu machen, und sind doch — von außen

betrachtet — wieder nur Inszenierungen zum Verkauf von Waren. Es bleibt

die Wissenschaft mit ihrer gesellschaftlichen Lizenz zur Wahrheitsfindung.

Doch mit welcher Methode will sie feststellen, was wahr und was inszeniert ist? Ergeben diese beiden Begriffe überhaupt ein sinnvolles Gegensatzpaar?

Ist nicht die Frage bereits unmöglich — nicht zuletzt, weil auch die Wissen-

schaft sich selbst als solche inszeniert? Und wie glaubwürdig, wirklich und

relevant ist ihre Inszenierung eigentlich für den Fan, dem der gerade ge-

hörte Song viel wirklicher erscheint als die nüchterne Prosa der Wissen-

schaft? Übersetzt man Poes Refrain in ihre Sprache, könnte es heißen: »Es gibt keine inszenierungsfreie Zone. Hinter jeder entlarvten Inszenierung

steckt womöglich eine weitere.«2

In »A Dream Within A Dream« geht es weiter: »And I hold within my

hand / Grains of the golden sand — / How few! yet how they creep / Through 1 In den Liner Notes zur LP von Alan Parsons Project (1976). Tales Of Mystery And

Imagination. 20th Century Records, AA6370 243 1 Y. 2 Jens Bergmann / Bernhard Pörksen (2007). Medienmenschen. Wie man Wirk-

lichkeit inszeniert. Münster: Solibro-Verlag, S. 19.

EDITORIAL

8

my fingers to the deep«.3 Angesichts der Inszeniertheit aller Ebenen des

Systems spielt der Unterschied von wahr und falsch keine Rolle mehr, son-

dern nur noch der von glaubwürdig oder unglaubwürdig. Diese Entscheidung

muss freilich der (Un-)Gläubige ganz allein für sich fällen. Was der Wissen-

schaft bleibt, ist die Frage nach den Mechanismen und Institutionen der

Authentizitätsinszenierungen, nach den Maschinen, die den Stoff produzie-ren, aus dem die wahren Waren-Träume sind.

Die im vorliegenden Band versammelten Beiträge sind Schriftfassungen von Vorträgen, die anlässlich der 22. Arbeitstagung des Arbeitskreises Studium

Populärer Musik (ASPM) vom 18. bis 20. November 2011 in Kooperation mit

der Universität Paderborn, Fach Musik/Populäre Musik und Medien, in Pa-

derborn zum Schwerpunktthema »Populäre Inszenierungen / Inszenierungen

des Populären in der Musik« gehalten wurden. Im Namen des ASPM bedan-

ken sich die Herausgeber ganz herzlich bei der Fakultät für Kulturwissen-schaften der Universität Paderborn für die großzügige finanzielle Unter-

stützung der Tagung. Ganz besonderer Dank gebührt den KollegInnen und

Studierenden des Fachs Musik/Populäre Musik und Medien und vor allem

Christoph Jacke für ihre Gastfreundschaft und ihr Engagement bei der Orga-

nisation und Durchführung einer rundum gelungenen Tagung. Ein besonderer

Dank der Herausgeber gilt auch den GutachterInnen des Peer Review-Verfahrens, die leider, aber selbstverständlich ungenannt bleiben müssen.

Wer mehr wissen will über den ASPM, über aktuelle Forschungen, Publi-

kationen und anstehende oder vergangene Tagungen, findet diese Daten,

Fakten und Informationen rund um die Popularmusikforschung und vieles

mehr unter www.aspm-online.de und in unserer Internetzeitschrift Samples

(www.aspm-samples.de).

Dietrich Helms und Thomas Phleps

Osnabrück und Kassel, im Dezember 2012

3 David Lehman (Hg.) (2006). The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, S. 72.

9

THE VALUE OF LIVE MUSIC

Simon Frith

From April 2008 until April 2011 I directed a research project on live music

in Britain.1 We are now writing up our findings,2 and since February 2012 we

have had funding for a follow-up project, designed to establish ongoing links

between academic researchers, the live music industry and the wider public.3

The original research project was organized around an investigation of

the business of live music promotion and a crucial part of our method was

interviewing. We talked to more than 100 promoters, from the MD of Live

Nation in the UK and such big names as Harvey Goldsmith to local club

owners and enthusiasts. We covered all types of music (including classical) — which is one reason why our findings will fill three books.

One of my roles in the research team is to present our work to the live

music industry itself, whether by attending their trade events and writing

for their trade papers or by inviting them to seminars we organise. Such

»knowledge exchange« (to use current academic jargon) is not without its

problems and two kinds of miscommunication between university-based researchers and live music industry players particular interest me (and have

informed the design of our follow up project).

First, we apparently have quite different interpretations of a shared

phrase, »the value of live music«. Their take is, it seems, straightforwardly

economic: the value of live music can be measured by how much money

people are prepared to pay for it. Our approach, by contrast, is more philo-sophical (or up our own backsides, as the industry would say): what is it

that people think they are paying for? What exactly do they value? I'm not

1 See http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/livemusicproject. The project, ›The

promotion of live music in the UK — a historical, cultural and institutional ana-lysis‹, was funded by the AHRC (AH/F009437/1).

2 The first of a three volume history of live music in Britain, From Dance Hall to the 100 Club, covering 1950-1967, will be published by Ashgate in 2013.

3 ›Developing knowledge exchange in the live music sector‹ (AH/J00474X1/1), for details see www.livemusicexchange.org.

SIMON FRITH

10

sure the differences here are quite what they seem and I will come back to

this, just noting here that it is only in the record business that you hear

executives bemoaning the fact that »people don't value music any more«

(meaning that they won't pay sufficiently for CDs or downloads). Promoters

have, on the whole, a subtler understanding of the value of music in

people's everyday lives and how this effects their spending decisions. Second, it was soon apparent to us that current promoters are not much

interested in the past of their business (though they do enjoy reminiscing

about the old days). They are, understandably, far more concerned about

the future. A couple of years ago I was therefore asked to write my own

account of what the music world would look like in 2025, and to present

this for discussion at MaMA, the annual Paris-based European music business event. I will come back to my predictions at the end of this paper. I need to

begin, though, by saying something about how I reached them.

My starting points were that all predictions of the future are wrong and

that the best way to look forwards is to look back or, more precisely, to

look at the futures that were predicted in the past. Two such scenarios are

relevant here. The first scenario was that live music had no future. As Glenn Gould

famously wrote in High Fidelity in 1966:

»In an unguarded moment some months ago, I predicted that the public concert as we know it today would no longer exist a century hence, that its functions would have been entirely taken over by the electronic media. It had not occurred to me that this statement represented a particularly radical pronouncement. Indeed, I regarded it almost as self-evident truth« (Gould 1966: 47).

This was the future that was assumed when I started researching the music

industry in the 1970s. Evidence for this prognosis was provided by both

economists and sociologists. In 1966, the same year that Glenn Gould pre-

dicted the end of the public concert, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen published Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. Baumol and

Bowen's analysis of »the cost-disease« that afflicted the performing arts was

highly influential on subsequent cultural economists (indeed, their book was

in effect the founding statement for the field).4 Its argument can be sum-

marized (for non economists) quite simply. A performing art like live music

faces necessary limits to both its economies of scale and its labour producti-vity. On the one hand, live concerts can only take place in a specific place

4 See, for example, the special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economics (20/3,

1996) on the book's 30th anniversary.

THE VALUE OF LIVE MUSIC

11

at a specific time to a finite audience (which has to be in hearing distance);

on the other hand, musical works have a fixed labour input: a quartet

cannot be played by a trio. The result is that the performing arts cannot

compete for leisure spending with the mass mediated arts in terms of price.

Concerts either have to be priced at levels which limit audiences to a

declining number of the wealthy, or they have to be subsidized in some way. (Baumol and Bowman were primarily concerned with concert music

and opera although their arguments are generally valid.)

Meanwhile, sociologists (and social historians) were documenting the

effects of the rise of recording on public and private listening habits. They

documented, for example, how live musicians were progressively replaced

by recorded musicians in cinemas5, hotels, dance halls, on radio and tele-vision and, most recently, even in the »live« performance of musicals and

ballet. In 1947 the Musicians' Union's assistant general secretary, Hardie

Ratcliffe, told readers of Melody Maker, the paper for dance band

musicians, that »We Must Beat the Record!«

»A show-down will come before long. Musicians throughout the world — particularly those providing dance music — will be forced to fight broad-casting and recording interests. The issue will be whether musicians are to control the recorded music they make or leave control to those with the money-bags. Musicians must beat the record — or go out of business!« (Ratcliffe 1947: 4).

Unfortunately for Ratcliffe the record won. From the mid-1950s an increas-

ing percentage of consumer spending on music was devoted to recording; a decreasing percentage to live performances. By 1966 in the popular music

world, at least, »music consumption« meant »record consumption«. When I

began researching The Sociology of Rock in the mid-1970s I took for granted

that the music industry was organised around the record industry, which

was by then clearly central to the economics of live music too: rock gigs

were primarily organised and financed to promote record sales. It was common sense, in short, to assume that the future of live music was

dependent either on high cultural policy and the provision of state support

to preserve Europe's classical music heritage and elite musical art scene or

else on the promotional policies of the record industry.

Move on 25 years to the early 2000s, when we first got interested in

researching the live music sector. There was by now, in the digital age, a quite different future scenario: live music was now the future; it was the

5 In the early 1920s two thirds of Britain's professional musicians were employed

in cinemas; within a decade there were none. See Davison 2012.

SIMON FRITH

12

recording industry that was supposedly doomed. Various economic develop-

ments were cited to support this suggestion:

• From the mid-1990s ticket prices started rising more rapidly than infla-

tion. Concerts became more expensive than CDs (previously promoters

had tended to peg ticket prices to CD prices).

• In terms of consumers' »wallet share«, expenditure on records now be-gan a steady decrease.

• The impact of downloading and file sharing on record pricing and sales meant that the ratio of musicians' earnings from live performance to

their earnings from record sales began a steady rise.6

• By the turn of the century a new kind of international live music business had emerged. In the early 2000s, for example, all the major

promotional/venue companies in Britain were taken over by such global

players as Live Nation and AEG.

By the end of the 2000s annual expenditure in Britain on live music was greater than expenditure on all forms of recorded music and the live music

business had become the biggest employer in the British music economy.7

Globally (following its merger with Ticketmaster), Live Nation can now plausibly be described as the world's biggest music company (only the

Universal Music Group has a comparable turnover). The common sense sug-

gestion has become that the music industry means the live music industry.

Live music industry decisions are certainly central now to the economics of

recording: if bands once toured to promote album sales, they now release

albums to promote their concerts. In twenty years time the assumptions here will probably seem as mis-

placed as the assumptions about the future of live music in the 1970s seem

to us today, but I'm less interested in the inevitability of false predictions

than in thinking about what we can learn from them. It could be suggested,

for example, that the problem of the doom scenario was that by focusing so

rigorously on the economics of live music it neglected the effects of music's ideological value. After all, »the concert hall« experience has always been

the ideal of the classical recording industry (which it sought to make

available in the living room) and the rock world, like the folk and jazz

6 One effect was record company exploration of so-called 360º degree deals in

which they took their share of live concert revenue. Another was that HMV (a record retailer) took over the Mama group (a venue chain).

7 See, for example, »UK live revenues surpass record Sales.« In: Music Week, 17th March 2009. http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/uk-live-revenues-surpass-record-sales/039558 (accessed 19th September 2012).

THE VALUE OF LIVE MUSIC

13

worlds, has always treated the live show as the most authentic setting for

musical expression.

One could argue, in short, that the cultural meaning of music remained

rooted in live performance even at the height of record company domi-

nation of the music industry and, more generally, I now believe that my

working assumption in The Sociology of Rock that music was a rights industry was wrong or, at least, misleading. Rather, it is better understood

as a service industry. Most musicians make a living selling services rather

than exploiting rights, and live performance is the service they mostly sell —

to a wide range of clients, not just to concert promoters and club owners,

but also to record, film, television, advertising, videogame, and other me-

dia companies, to cruise ships and casinos, to a variety of private customers for music at weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs and other such events. And

such music making goes on despite the cost disease.

That said, it could equally well be argued that present day optimists

about the future of the live music sector are ignoring the economic

symptoms that the cost disease describes (and there is increasing evidence

that the live music »boom« anyway peaked in 2010).8 Our research project was designed in part to examine how British promoters have addressed

these cost problems historically and it's worth indicating here some of their

solutions:

The most significant is probably the music festival. In the European

classical music world, festivals can be dated back to the eighteenth century

and by the early nineteenth century many British cities had annual »musical festivals«. The first Edinburgh Musical Festival, for example, held between

30th October and 5th November 1815, featured seven concerts in two venues

with 150 performers. It brought in visitors — »the concourse of strangers

towards Edinburgh was unexampled«, as a report of the time put it, adding

that »all the lodgings round the city were occupied« (McLarty 2010: 8).

(There was already, it seems, an association being made between a music festival, the attraction of visitors, and the local economy.) But the explo-

sion of classical music festivals was a post-1945 phenomenon. Bruno Frey

(1994) cites figures suggesting that there were at least 1000 and possibly as

many as 2000 such annual festivals in Europe by the end of the 1970s

(numbers vary according to what is defined as a festival); in Britain regular

classical, folk, jazz and blues festivals were well established by the end of the 1950s, and rock festivals have been a familiar part of the calendar since

8 The best source of UK music industry data is PRS for Music, which publishes

annual economic reports. Copyright Societies in other countries also provide relevant data. US ticket sales are monitored by Pollstar.

SIMON FRITH

14

the 1960s, although the huge increase in the number and variety of popular

music festivals has been a twenty first century phenomenon.

Festivals offer various solutions to the cost disease. In terms of eco-

nomies of scale outdoor festivals at least can reach much larger audiences

than is possible in an indoor venue (especially as audience members can be

mobile between different stages). In terms of productivity, the investment in staging infrastructure — sound and lights, security, promotion and publi-

city, ticketing, etc. — is sufficient for a much larger number of performers

and performances than is possible for a show in a theatre and, as Frey

points out, festivals also tend to use contracted freelance workers (rather

than concert halls' salaried permanent staff) which cuts labour costs.

Festivals also have a value that is qualitatively different from that of routine concerts and which cannot simply be measured as a quantitative

accumulation of performances. Many festivals, that is to say (Glastonbury is

a good example), have established themselves as »leisure experiences«

involving something more than music. A rock festival like Scotland's T in the

Park thus routinely sells out before it has announced its line-up; classical

musical festivals, as Frey (1994: 37) documents, are sold as part of all-in luxury holidays. A festival ticket may well offer the consumer good value for

money (in terms of the number of acts seen) but festival goers are also

willing to invest much more into time, travel and subsistence costs than

they would be willing to pay as an add-on to a workaday gig. For a promoter

a festival is thus an essential part of their portfolio — it has a much higher

profit margin than a tour and, even more importantly, offers a sure return on the investment.

A second way of achieving both economies of scale and an increase in

productivity is by putting on a succession of performances in the same

venue, as »a run«. Instead of an act touring from town to town, audiences

are encouraged to take a trip to a single venue where the act will play for

many nights. This was the entertainment model developed in Las Vegas by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and, more recently, Celine Dion, who from 2002

played five nights a week at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, for an

astonishing five years. Promoters can invest sufficiently in a single space to

stage a spectacular show that can command higher ticket prices as well as

reaching a much bigger audience who, like festival-goers, may well treat

the musical act as just part of a broader leisure experience (involving a night in an up-market hotel, fine dining, and a flutter on the roulette

wheel). This is also, of course, the way in which musicals work (and UK pro-

moters have developed a strategy of moving such shows as the Sound of

Music to provincial cities for extended runs after their London dates have

THE VALUE OF LIVE MUSIC

15

come to an end). In recent years the promotion of concert runs has moved

beyond traditional showbiz and variety to rock. AEG, for example, booked

Prince for 21 nights into its O2 venue in London, and it's worth noting here

that unlike the tour, neither the festival nor the extended single venue run

lend themselves easily to the established timetable of record promotion.

Their rise is both an effect of and a solution to the decline of record industry power.

Other promoter strategies have a much longer history. The advantage of

owning venues and developing venue chains (like Live Nation) was under-

stood by music hall promoters in the mid-nineteenth century and led to

Britain's first large entertainment corporations. The creation of centrally

owned performance networks both increased promoters' bargaining power in their dealings with artists and their agents and added to their ways of

making money out of live shows. Music hall owners took their profits from

their sales of food and drink and cloakroom services.9 Since the 1960s

British club owners have also maximized returns from their space by

combining bands and deejays, live shows and club nights.

Music promoters have understood the economic significance of ticketing for an equally long time — certainly since the end of the eighteenth century

— and the point to stress here is that the history of ticketing is tied up with

the history of technology (for ticket buyers and sellers the most significant

twentieth century invention was undoubtedly the credit card). In the live

music sector the most important effect of digital technology has therefore

been the rise of Ticketmaster. (Compare the way we now buy tickets instantly, at home, at the click of a computer key, with the time and

trouble of physical queuing, preparing and sending off a stamped addressed

envelope, or waiting on hold for hours for a phone line to be free.) But

ticketing matters economically not for its convenience for customers but as

an additional source of income for promoters. The provision of ticketing

services (for around 30% of the ticket price) brings in profits whether or not a particular gig sells enough tickets to cover other costs.

Finally (as various critics of Baumol and Bowman have pointed out) in an

era of mass media the physical restriction on live audience size is less

absolute than it might seem. From early in the BBC's history, for example,

the Proms season was a live music promotion that was simultaneously

designed for a mass wireless audience, and broadcasters have been important for the economics of the live music business ever since. Digital

technology currently allows live performances to be streamed (to mobile

9 Parking services can now be added to this list.

SIMON FRITH

16

phones, for instance) while the New York Metropolitan Opera House has

developed an influential model of global simulcasts, live shows as available

to cinema audiences round the world as to the people actually sitting in the

limited number of seats in the Met itself.

What I've been describing here is music promoters' enterprise in using

technological, industrial and cultural change as an opportunity to increase their returns. It remains the case, however, that these are restricted solu-

tions to live music's cost problems. Most events continue to happen without

these income streams, and for these shows production costs continue to

exceed the returns from ticket sales at the prices most consumers are

willing to pay. The percentage of live shows that result in the multimillion

dollar earnings reported each year by Pollstar is probably even smaller than the percentage of record releases that went platinum in the heyday of the

record industry. And this situation has only been exacerbated by the decline

of record company tour support. The fact also remains that the economic

loss on most live shows is borne to a disproportionate extent by the perfor-

mers, whose fees may or may not cover their costs for a particular show but

certainly don't repay their investment over time in their careers. Live music promoters and performers, in short, continue to depend on

some kind of subsidy or alternative revenue stream to supplement their

returns from the box office, and the state (at both national and local level)

remains an important source of subsidy and not just for classical and art

music events (though most of these wouldn't happen without public

funding). The cost of building and maintaining municipal stadiums, an essential resource for rock and pop promoters, is mostly borne by local

authorities, for example, and most music festivals depend on public re-

sources (space, infrastructure) provided at no or low prices.

Over the last fifty years state support has come to be matched by

commercial sponsorship of various kinds. Brewers, in particular, have been

key players in the live music scene — if Tennents were to change its brand-ing policy, for example, many promoters in Scotland would find it difficult

to survive. For musicians (particularly those in specialist markets, though

this is beginning to be true for rock performers too) gig sales of records and

other merchandise make a significant addition to box office income. The

decline of record retail has meant the development of the live concert as a

kind of mobile music stall, live and recorded sounds equally available. I've been trying to provide here a summary account of the dynamics of

change in the promotional business, by examining the ways in which

promoters respond to the economic problems they face by using new

technologies and meeting new consumer demands as well as by drawing on

THE VALUE OF LIVE MUSIC

17

established business strategies and connections. In order to offer a credible

account of the future we need a clear understanding of how change works.

And there is a final descriptive point to be made from this perspective. The

problems that have emerged from the most recent period of change are the

problems that the music industry will be addressing in moving to the next

period. Our research identifies three in particular.

The problem of investment and career development

The economics of the record industry are organised around the mass production, reproduction and distribution of things. As in other publishing

industries, the huge profits on best sellers support investment in any num-

ber of poor sellers (the conventional wisdom in the rock era was that record

companies issued 1 hit to 10 misses). Between the mid-1960s and late 1990s

musicians' careers depended on this kind of cross-subsidy. It is not a model

that promoters can adopt. The large profits made on big name tours go primarily to the artists (and their managers); they are not invested in new

or as yet »unpopular« acts.10 It is not clear, in current economic conditions,

what will replace record company investment. (Those acts that have been

successful in putting together sufficient funds from fan investment via the

Web have all so far been established acts, names that were known to fans

because of earlier label deals.) Given that the most successful live bands nowadays are »heritage acts«, whose audiences are drawn from a long

nurtured fan base, the question becomes how will new acts develop such

support without any traditional record company investment. A model in

which large acts drive the profitability of the live sector thus allowing

promoters to lose money on lesser known acts is not sustainable unless the

latter can be supported for long enough to become the former.11 From this perspective live music promotion has to be seen as a long not

a short term business. Promoters need to build audiences, to look after per-

formers at all stages of their career and, to this end, the live music sector

has its own necessary eco-system. It depends on flourishing local live scenes

as well large global players. When the sector rationalises in organisational

10 Some promoters do now subsidise tours of new acts in return for long term

contracts, but they don't have the resources to invest in such acts' recording, promotion or other development costs.

11 Major promoters aim to cover the costs of 25% of their shows, though the actual figure is probably closer to two-thirds.

SIMON FRITH

18

terms (and at the top end moves to oligopoly), as it has done over the last

decade, the economic challenge is to maintain a balance of large and small

promotional enterprise. The live music industry may now be dominated by a

small number of global corporations, but its health depends on a continuing

variety of local spaces (various in terms of size, atmosphere and booking

policy) and there is increasing evidence that such venues are, in fact, becoming less sustainable.12

One effect of a chain-owned venue opening in a medium-sized city, for

example, is that it becomes the venue at which all medium-sized acts will

appear. It makes better sense for their agents to do a single deal for a num-

ber of performances across the country than to do different deals, venue by

venue. Local promoters who could previously use such acts as to offset losses on local or upcoming bands, can no longer do so and their business

thus becomes much more precarious. In Sheffield, for example, the Uni-

versity Students Union, long the meeting place for local independent rock

fans and performers, has not been able to compete for hit acts with the

newly opened Sheffield Academy; it has had to switch its booking attention

to comedy. Historically one can see a recurring cycle of venue organisation: consolidation and centralisation is followed eventually by bankruptcy, as

new local venues (quicker to adapt to changes in musical tastes and

practices) begin to flourish before, in turn consolidating and centralising.

The problem of regulat ion

Unlike the record business, the live music business is subject to a complex

variety of regulation — the health, safety and potential nuisance of public

gatherings has long been a matter of public interest. Live music thus in-

volves politics on a daily basis, as is clear in the history of the UK's licensing

laws. Two issues are currently of particular significance. First, governments' increasing concern about alcohol misuse (particularly among young people)

is clearly a threat to the continuing interdependence of the live music and

the drinks industries. Second, promoters face increasing public concern

about noise pollution, whether in terms of the health and safety of the live

music work force or the peace of mind of a venue's residential neighbours.

It seems reasonable to predict that over the next decade live music pro-moters will have to wean themselves from their dependence on alcohol.

(This is not impossible, by the way. The development of a new kind of youth 12 See, for example, http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/26/rock-music-

venues-bust-britain?INTCMP=SRCH (accessed 12th September 2012).

THE VALUE OF LIVE MUSIC

19

music in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called British beat boom,

took place largely in venues that were not licensed to sell alcohol.) Noise

anxieties will be harder to resolve, however. They are likely to become a

matter for planning laws and the organisation of urban space, for policy

decisions that are not under promoters' control. The underlying issue here,

though, is that the more musical spaces are regulated — made orderly and »quiet« — the less appealing they become for audiences who want, precise-

ly, a noisy night out.

The problem of value, a return to the start ing point

In the present economic situation, people have less money to spend on

anything. It is arguable that live music becomes more valuable to people in

a recession, a source of good times amidst the bad, and our research does

suggests that live music is valued as an experience that is somehow un-

touched by market forces. But this way of enjoying music is threatened if concerts become over-commoditised, venues too standardised, the exploita-

tion of the consumer too obvious. People »illegally« download not just

because they want music for free but because in the 1990s CDs prices came

to be seen as a »rip off«. Promoters will have problems if ticket prices are

seen similarly. The value of live music involves experiences and beliefs on

which people may not be interested in putting a price. In our research we were particularly interested by the central role of the enthusiast in British

music history, the promoter who is not concerned with profit but simply

wants to share music, to build a new audience/market (that commercial

promoters can then exploit). There is a clear danger that as the live sector

becomes more economically rational it will destroy the irrationality on

which its cultural value to some extent depends. Interestingly even the most commercial promoters we spoke to were aware of this. A »good« gig

for them (as for audiences and performers) is not the gig that makes the

most (or even any) profit but the gig that delivers on the promise of live

music, that makes everyone present feel that presence so intensely that

nothing else seems to matter.

To conclude, then. Given our understanding of the dynamics of change in the live music sector and the problems it presently faces, what can we

predict for the future of music?

Some things we can be sure of:

SIMON FRITH

20

• People will still express and understand themselves through music.

• People will still make and listen to music together.

• People will still dance to music.

• People will still try to make money out of music.

• Music will still be necessary for public and private entertainment.

• Music that gave pleasure in the past will still give pleasure in the future.

• There will be new technological ways of storing, sharing and hearing music that we can't yet imagine.

And some things we can sensibly guess:

By 2025 there will be no stadium gigs. Economically and aesthetically they will long have been thought pointless. The Rolling Stones and U2 will hang

on to the model but even they will finally have to give up and stadium rock

won't be the object of nostalgia. Uncomfortable, poor sight and sound lines,

tedious travel and car park queues — who would go back to that? As people's

willingness to pay high prices (and all the add-ons) for such gigs declines (and state funding cuts means a lack of resources for stadium maintenance)

the stadium show will no longer be an economic proposition. Live Nation

and Ticketmaster will inevitably go bust (one can't run a successful live

music business from a corporate headquarters indefinitely) while continuing

developments in mobile phone and payment technology will make ticketing

an entirely personal act/audience transaction, with no need of third person ticketing (or secondary ticketing) services. The large venues that will be

flourishing in 2025 will be organised on the model of the London Dome —

smaller, flexible, comfortable spaces, in which bands can settle for a live

season and in which music will be only one of many kinds of entertainment.

There will still be festivals.

By 2025, though, there will be no record shops, but then there will be no record companies either. There will be tracks and albums but they won't

be funded, published, promoted or distributed in physical form by com-

panies on the model of EMI, Universal, etc. Music will no longer be treated

as an asset. It will be, rather (as it has always been) a service, for which

musicians will be paid at the point of delivery. A new kind of large music

company will emerge, based not on the ownership of rights but the packag-ing of services, whether musicians for weddings or the provision of ever

more sophisticated »apps« for the various new sorts of personal computer/

communications devices. Such companies will bring together in one place

the old roles of artist management, music agency and concert promotion

with a new expertise in music placement and will function as brokers

between musical supply and demand. A music economy built round services

THE VALUE OF LIVE MUSIC

21

rather than assets does not need musicians to sign long-term contracts and

will shift the way consumers think about music, not as an object (record,

song) to be possessed but as an experience (of which music might be only

one part) to be enjoyed. This will be worth paying for but not as a single

sort of transaction (buying a record or a ticket) but as a whole series of dif-

ferent transactions and the result will be a fragmented rather than a mass market. The era of the global superstar will die with the Rolling Stones. A

musical career will be more localised, more erratic, more humble.

In the 2025 economy of commercial musical services the model for

what, in the era of the musical product, were called distribution and

promotion will be radio and, more specifically, BBC Radio. The BBC has

established radio services through which a great variety of music (live and recorded) is permanently available on a great variety of digital outlets and

devices over which the listener has a great deal of control in terms of how

and when they listen. These services are paid for by a license fee, which

enables the musicians involved to be directly rewarded according to how

much and often their work is used, and are crucial for the construction of

musical communities, audiences sharing tastes determined by musical rather than commercial judgements. Inspired by the BBC model, a number

of successful music providing companies will follow the pioneering if short-

lived on-line service, Spotify (which became over-dependent on record com-

pany support).

By 2025 there will be three distinctive musical worlds, which, in busi-

ness terms, will be organised by different kinds of company and entre-preneur: the dance music world, organised around the provision of sounds

and spaces for dancers; the talent music world, organised around the

provision of performers for visual media entertainment shows and songs for

adverts, soundtracks, private pa systems and shopping malls; and the art

music world, organised around the ideology of music as art, something up-

lifting and transcendent, a source of national pride and an activity requiring state educational and financial investment. Such ideology will be not only

be applied to classical or »academic« music. »Art« music will include folk,

jazz, and rock music; and the album, on the one hand, and the concert, on

the other, will still be seen as the forms most appropriate to music as art.

State subsidies will be directed accordingly, to acts, venues and music

service companies alike (a necessary substitute for the now banned alcohol company support).

By 2025 IASPM will be devoted entirely to such art music and will have

changed its name. »Popular« music as we know it will no longer exist.

SIMON FRITH

22

Bibl iography

Baumol, William J. / Bowen, William G. (1966). Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. New York: Twentieth Century Fund.

Davison, Annette (2012). »Workers Rights and Performing Rights: Cinema Music and Musicians prior to Synchronized Sound.« In: Sounds of the Silents in Britain. Ed. by Julie Brown and Annette Davison. Oxford: Oxford University Press [in print].

Frey, Bruno S. (1994). »The Economics of Music Festivals.« In: Journal of Cultural Economics 18, pp. 29-39.

Gould, Glenn (1966). »On the Prospects of Recording.« In: High Fidelity 16:4 (April), pp. 46-63.

McLarty, Iain (2010). A Signal Triumph over Strong National Prejudices: The Edinburgh Musical Festivals of the Early Nineteenth Century. MMus Dissertation, University of Edinburgh.

Ratcliffe, Hardie (1947). »We Must Beat the Record!« In: Melody Maker, 15 November, p. 4.

Abstract

This paper suggests that ›the value of live music‹ may be defined in two ways:

economically, live music treated as a source of income and profit, or culturally,

live music experienced as something that is valuable because it can't be monetised.

Most analyses of the live music sector focus on its economic value. The orthodox

view from the 1950s was that the live music industry was suffering from an

incurable ›cost disease‹ and live music promotion thus became entirely subordinate

to and financially dependent on the recorded music sector. Since the 1990s, how-

ever, the economics of the record industry has been undermined by digital techno-

logy while the live sector has apparently flourished. Both these accounts of the live

music business are flawed. They take too little account of live music's cultural

value and underestimate promoters' entrepreneurial ingenuity.